Introduction

This is now the eighth special issue of Information, Communication & Society to play host to the best scholarship generated by the Association of Internet Research conference. The papers offered here were peer reviewed and selected for presentation at the Association’s annual conference, IR15, held in Daegu, Korea, in October 2014, and then further reviewed as they were readied for publication. We are especially indebted to the Association leadership and conference organizers for their work and commitment to the event, the Association, and the field, particularly Michael Zimmer, Erika Perason, Anna Hoffman, Han Woo Park, Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, and Lori Kendall. The 2014 conference was certainly marked by its choice of location. The conference was originally slated to be held in Bangkok. But after the uncertainty brought on by Thailand’s military coup in May, the conference executive committee wisely decided that a new venue was needed. The challenge to identify a new location quickly was met by Han Woo Park and Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, who rallied to make the necessary plans in Daegu, Korea. What could have been a disaster was more than salvaged: conference attendees had very positive comments about the city and the venue. Of course, hosting the conference outside the United States always changes the mix of people who attend, and shifting the location and schedule late in the game probably had its own effects. But it did mean that, while a few familiar faces might have been absent, and some students might not have had the budget for the trip, the location allowed for much greater participation from new media scholars in Korea and around Asia, as well as from Europe and Australia. The conference focused on a number of hot topics. There was deep concern about new media labor dynamics: the growing implications of crowdwork and precarious information industry work, ongoing questions around user creation as a form of labor, and the host of social justice issues that accompany the sites and practices of new forms of work. Jack Linchuan Qiu (Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong) gave an extremely well-received keynote address on how Chinese laborers use social media to create ‘worker-generated content’ that both reflects and structures protest activities. There was also a growing fascination with information algorithms – including concerns about the value systems, forms of discrimination, and ethical accountabilities they represent and enable. And there were rich and lively conversations across multiple sessions discussing the latest surge of online harassment, bullying, and misogyny, fueled in part by the recent and

troubling '#gamergate' skirmishes. In presentations and in break-time chats there was a recurring chorus stressing the urgent need to study non-Western people, places, and eventsand the power that such work has both to surface new ideas and to ensure that scholars concretely engage with issues of global social justice.
The #ir15 Twitter feed, which has now become an important (sometimes countercurrent) component to the event, made abundantly clear the excitement generated by some of the preconferences. An emerging group of scholars interested in selfies demonstratedin part through their prolific generation of selfies before and during the conferencehow the genre speaks to many long-standing issues in internet research (e.g. self-presentation, privacy, and popular culture imagery). And the internet's perennial fascination with all things feline was well represented at IR15: many who attended the 'Towards a Theory of Internet Cats' pre-conference were later herded to a local 'cat café'. The event produced a new academic selfie+cat image corpus certain to generate analyses for years to come.
Among the papers submitted to the conference, and particularly those selected for publication here, the going concerns are more sober, or sobering. Some are assessing emerging phenomena, with more skepticism than ever before about the overstated promises about new media, democracy, participation, and liberation that accompany them. Others are chasing old concerns into new corners, to move discussions forward on questions this community has examined for a decade and a half. Still others are looking into the places where people grapple with what new media and information technologies are supposed to be, as they innovate and regulate them -finding that some of these discussions about new media in some ways make them so, through the discourse itself.
We begin with two papers, both curious about death and social media. This has emerged as a hot topic as of late, but in many ways extends a longer concern about what happens when new media are no longer new. If a social media platform is just months old and in eager startup mode, its providers hardly have to think about what happens when users die. But as these tools settle into common communication practices, they end up in places we might not have first imagined, like where we mourn the dead. These may not be the contexts and moments these platforms were designed for, but nonetheless, they have subtle, significant implications for how people make sense of and with new media.
Martin Gibbs, James Meese, Michael Arnold, Bjorn Nansen, and Marcus Carter take an empirical look at how Instagram users incorporate photography and sociality into contemporary rituals of mourning. By examining images tagged with #funeral, they find that Instagram users are doing much more than preserving the occasion for posterity or taking advantage of being well-dressed to take selfies. Through these images users are navigating the balance between the solemnity and sociality of funerals, making themselves present at the event and making the event present to their social network. They also introduce an intriguing concept, the 'platform vernacular', referring to the particular communication conventions that seem to emerge on (and sometimes across) particular platforms. They argue that these vernaculars stem from the combination of the platform's affordances and the user practices that develop amidst them.
Stine Gotved's article similarly speaks to this tension between the intimacy and publicness of death, by examining the growing use of Quick Response (QR) codes to augment physical gravestones with digital content. Using Goffman's notion of stages and Nissenbaum's theory of privacy as contextual integrity, she analyzes the physical design of QR-enhanced gravestones (they require people to stand closer to memorials, from which they have traditionally maintained respectful distances), their use as gateways to digital representations of the dead (reflecting a life related to but distinct from that on the deceased's social network sites), and the contested nature of QR gravestones as commercial objects (by contrasting the different ways that cemeteries and stonecutters understand their ethical obligations when selling products of and for the dead).
Her paper teaches us much about how representations of loved onesand memories of thememerge from intertwining physical and digital design. Taken together, Gotved and Gibbs et al. show how, as new media technologies infiltrate our rituals of death, mourning, and memorialization, we see both the domestication of and discomfort with new media platforms.
The next two papers attempt to enrich the extensive literature concerned with privacy implications of social media by looking at communities that have thus far tended to fall outside the focus of the internet scholarship. Jacqueline Vickery's paper extends the growing literature concerned with how teens manage privacy in social and mobile media environments, by deliberately turning an ethnographic eye to low-income and ethnically diverse teens. Not only do these teens negotiate the opportunities and perils of public disclosure in social media, but they also deal with the regimes of surveillance and expectation commonly imposed on 'at-risk' teens by parents and schools, the intrusive norms of peers, and the practical reality of having to share devices or do without them entirely. She finds that these teens find ways to share devices so as to stake claims to their privacy, and seek out platforms other than Facebook to explore different aspects of their identities in front of different audiences. Her research leads to an intriguing read of nonuse, as an agentive privacy strategy amidst the encroaching surveillance of parents and the social demands of their peers.
Lee Humphreys and Rowan Wilken similarly focus their attention on an understudied demographic of social media users: small business owners using networked platforms such as Foursquare to advertise and market their commercial ventures. In doing so they highlight empirical sites often ignored by scholarship focused on individual users and platform makers, and they trace a set of privacy challenges uniquely faced by small business owners using social media. They make clear how these businesspeople negotiate their personal identities versus those of their companies, selectively sharing or keeping confidential information about themselves and about their customers. As with Vickery's teens, these users leave clues about their self-conceptions and social positions as they adopt and resist the privacy practices suggested by social media platforms. Together, they give us insight not only into these two particular and understudied communities, but also into the array of strategies unintended users deploy to make social media platforms work for them.
Then, two papers examine the efforts of industry and policy stakeholders to define the parameters of networked technologies and services. Their aim is to understand how the language and frameworks of those who structure conversations, convene meetings, and set standards all create the conditions under which information technologies develop and are deployed.
Tony Liao reports on his extensive participant-observation within the Augmented Reality (AR) industry, detailing the subtle interplays among software designers, advertisers, and marketers, all vying to influence and control technologies and businesses developing simultaneously. Liao notes how seemingly straightforward decisions about the size, contrast, or placement of an AR image are actually moments of sociotechnical contestation, in which technological and business interests collide and reconcile. By examining the language, rhetoric, and framings of AR industry materials and actors' self-descriptions, Liao provides insight into how diverse forces shape the emergence of industries and technological fields.
In a complementary essay, Gerard Goggin draws us into the international policy process to consider how accessibility rights for disabled users of network technologies have been articulated. By examining the debate about how to include accessibility in the development of internet standards, particularly in the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society meetings in 2003 and 2005 and the planning meetings that led up to them, Goggin traces shifts in the language used by accessibility advocates. It is a cogent analysis of how disability has been inserted into the broader category of 'communication rights', how the needs of disabled users have been positioned alongside those of other communities, and what role is played by both multi-stakeholder policy organizations and the groups which mobilize to address them.
Finally, we end the issue with a strongly voiced assertion of how to take these critical challenges and expectations to one of the next topics on the horizon, crowdfunding. Rodrigo Davies presents a generative set of empirically grounded arguments showing how civic crowdfunding differs from crowdfunding more generally. Grounded in close readings of British, American, and Brazilian crowdfunding platforms and the discourses surrounding them, he shows how such systems embody different definitions of 'participation', how they reinforce and challenge social inequalities, and how they exist uneasily alongside government institutions increasingly trying to fund public services. His provocations will help guide future research and experimentation on crowdfunding, showing how platform prototypes connect to civic virtues. The essay was singled out by the IR conference as the Best Student Paper of 2014.
Taken together, this special issue represents not only some of the best work emerging from IR15, but also a set of empirical sites, analytical frameworks, and normative challenges that can help guide the field of internet research for years to come. A conference that wisely and nimbly relocated still proved to be a home for the kind of richly critical and interdisciplinary scholarship that has reliably emerged from both the Association for Internet Research and Information, Communication & Society.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Tarleton Gillespie, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England. He is the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (2014). His research examines how social media platforms shape public discourse through their design and governance.
Mike Ananny, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and affiliated faculty with USC's Science, Technology and Society cluster. He studies how the design and sociotechnical dynamics of networked news systems encode normative theories of the press. [email: ananny@usc.edu].